Announcing new fine-tuning models and techniques in Azure AI Foundry

By Dustin Ward

Today, we’re excited to announce three major enhancements to model fine-tuning in Azure AI Foundry—Reinforcement Fine-Tuning (RFT) with o4-mini (coming soon), Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) for the GPT-4.1-nano and Llama 4 Scout model (available now). These updates reflect our continued commitment to empowering organizations with tools to build highly customized, domain-adapted AI systems for real-world impact. …

Microsoft’s Virtual Datacenter Tour opens a door to the cloud

By Dustin Ward

Imagine stepping into a realm where the cloud meets cutting-edge technology, revealing the inner workings behind servers, fiber optic network cables, operations, physical datacenter buildings, and the most advanced AI infrastructure. This is Microsoft’s Virtual Datacenter Tour, where customers can explore the infrastructure and datacenter design that powers over 60 datacenter regions and 300 plus…

Empowering multi-agent apps with the open Agent2Agent (A2A) protocol

By Dustin Ward

Over the past year, we’ve seen AI agents evolve from experimental tools to essential components of enterprise systems. From simple prompt and response bots to agents that act autonomously on your behalf, this shift marks a new era of software design where intelligence is no longer tied to static interfaces or single applications. At Microsoft,…

One year of Phi: Small language models making big leaps in AI

By Dustin Ward

A new era of AI  One year ago, Microsoft introduced small language models (SLMs) to customers with the release of Phi-3 on Azure AI Foundry, leveraging research on SLMs to expand the range of efficient AI models and tools available to customers.  Today, we are excited to introduce Phi-4-reasoning, Phi-4-reasoning-plus, and Phi-4-mini-reasoning—marking a new era…

Azure AI Foundry: Your GPS for the changing AI landscape

By Dustin Ward

I spent most of the last decade in the Midwest (hello, Chicagoland!) but now live in the Seattle area and work at the Microsoft campus in Redmond. Before moving here, I’d visited the Redmond campus dozens of times as a Microsoft partner and customer, but had only basic airport-campus-hotel-restaurant navigation skills. Relocating a family of…

Unveiling GPT-image-1: Rising to new heights with image generation in Azure AI Foundry

By Dustin Ward

We are thrilled to announce the launch of GPT-image-1, the latest and most advanced image generation model, coming soon to eligible customers on Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service. This groundbreaking model sets a new standard in generating high-quality images, solving complex prompts, and offering zero-shot capabilities in various scenarios. Build custom generative AI solutions That’s enough…